Ordinary hoses are quite common and are used in a wide variety of industrial, medical and commercial applications. For certain applications, the walls of the hose may be corrugated to provide greater flexibility and ease of use.
Further, multiple hoses may be required in tandem for certain applications, such as ones where gases or liquids are transferred to and from the same device. The combination of multiple hoses can, in appropriate situations, be conventionally replaced by a single hose providing at least one inner lateral partition that allows for multiple compartments or lumens within the same hose. For instance, one such known multi-compartment hose, described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,746 to Sikora, is used in an anaesthetic and respiratory breathing device. The device disclosed by Sikora involves the use of a two-compartment corrugated hose as part of an apparatus that separates the gas inhaled from the gas exhaled.
Many applications, such as the one described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,121,746, require that the multiple compartment or multi-lumen hose be flexible, durable and capable of being manufactured in variable sizes and lengths.
It is also known that corrugated hoses can be manufactured in several ways, such as by the well-known continuous blow molding or vacuum assisted blow molding methods. One such method is described in U.S. Pat. No. 3,286,305 to Seckel, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein by reference.
Although it has been known that inner lateral membranes serving as partitions in multi-compartment tubing may be extruded directly from the die or inserted inside a hose to create the multiple compartments, a drawback associated with prior known inner partitions and their methods of manufacture is the creation of a stiffening "I-beam" effect in the resulting product caused by the presence of the partition. This I-beam effect reduces the overall flexibility of the tube.
Thus, it is an object of the invention to provide a multi-lumen corrugated hose with a corrugated inner partition that is durable as well as flexible in all directions.